It was a foregone conclusion that he should decline their invitation, and he did so; but the mere occasion for doing it gave his mind an impetus in the direction in which he had been able hitherto to check it.  He began again to think of the feminine, to dream of it, to long for it.  For the time being it was the feminine in the abstract—­without features or personality.  As far as it took form at all it was with the dainty, nestling seductiveness that belonged to what he called his “type”—­a charm that had nothing in common with the forest grace of the Wild Olive or the dash of the Misses Martin.

Now and then he caught glimpses of it, but it was generally out of reach.  Soft eyes, of the velvety kind that smote him most deliciously, would lift their light upon him through the casement of some old Spanish residence, or from the daily procession of carriages moving slowly along the palm avenue at Palermo or in the Florida.  When this happened he would have a day or two of acting foolishly, in the manner of the Bonarense bucks.  He would stand for hours of his leisure time—­if he could get away from the office at the minute of the fashionable promenade—­on the pavement of the Florida, or under a palm-tree in the park, waiting for a particular carriage to drive round again and again and again, while he returned the sweet gaze which the manners of the country allow an unknown lady to bestow, as a rose is allowed to shed its beauty.  This being done, he would go away, and realize that he had been making himself ridiculous.

Once the incarnation of his dreams came so near him that it was actually within his grasp.  The tree of the knowledge of good and evil dangled its fruit right before his eyes in the person of Mademoiselle Hortense, who sang at the CafA(C) Florian, while the clients, of whom he was sometimes one, smoked and partook of refreshments.  She was just the little round, soft, dimpling, downy bundle of youth and love he so often saw in his mind’s eye, and so rarely in reality, and he was ready to fall in love with any one.  The mutual acquaintance was formed, as a matter of course, over the piece of gold he threw into the tambourine, from which, as she passed from table to table, she was able to measure her hearer’s appreciation of art.  Those were the days in which he first began to be able to dress well, and to have a little money to throw away.  For ten days or a fortnight he threw it away in considerable sums, being either in love or in a condition like it.  He respected Mademoiselle Hortense, and had sympathy with her in her trials.  She was desperately sick of her roving life as he was of Mrs. Wilson’s boarding-house.  She was as eager to marry and settle down as he to have a home.  The subject was not exactly broached between them, but they certainly talked round it.  The decisive moment came on the night when her troupe was to sail for Montevideo.  In the most delicate way in the world she gave him to understand that she would remain even at the eleventh